


Notes on the revelation of an unknown dissident

by kittu9



Series: The Secret No One Knows [2]
Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Doomed Relationship, F/M, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-20 14:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has a beginning. Clow meets Yuuko and asks for a wish he shouldn't want granted. A love affair and several centuries of misery ensue, but who's counting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes on the revelation of an unknown dissident

Clow Reed was a young man the first time he made his way through her garden gate. After the usual rigmarole—the ostentatious proclamations, afternoon tea served on her convenient terrace—he made his first wish.

“I wish to be the most powerful magician that ever was in the world,” he told her, all scholar-seriousness and graceless elbows. He was a good-looking man, young and horribly earnest. Already he was powerful enough to tamper, a very little, with what was to come (mostly he used this power to ensure that it rained enough in his garden, particularly upon the tomatoes planted at the south end). He looked rather wounded (those deepdeepdark eyes staring at her from behind his glasses, he was unfairly lovely. Yuuko had very precise ideas about fairness) when she laughed so hard that she fell out of her chair and was unable to compose herself for five full minutes. She knew he was serious—he hadn’t yet learned to disguise that genuinely sweet look that he assumed automatically in the presence of knowledge (later, when time and grief had worn him down somewhat and the two of them met regularly to drink too much and argue far more, Yuuko would notice with less sympathy than intoxication how Clow’s eyes had become steeped with a sort of loss that had no fix. She wasn’t impressed; she saw that sort of thing all the time, especially when she looked in the mirror).

As always, her price was a fair one (perhaps it was even generous? But not really: Yuuko knew what he was really asking for. Clow hadn’t quite grasped the idea—); she reached out and kissed him—first his brow (wisdom, foresight, a bit late), very gently; and his heart (power); and, lastly, his mouth (this was the truth of the matter) and she breathed into him that thing which he desired.

(It wasn’t so surprising, she thought, without bitterness. He was a young man, and magic is a great power. It may have seemed akin to love at the time.)

The magic shuddered along their tongues as she kissed him, and even after he had swallowed the little butterfly of his wish, Clow did not draw entirely away. He sat quite still (during this whole exchange he had not moved from his chair, although Yuuko had moved all over and into his personal space) and he regarded her with the strange thoughtfulness inherent in curious men. Then he reached back, just a little, and when _he_ kissed _her_ , her price extracted itself from behind the curved bones of his skull.

*

“What was it?” Clow would ask her later, as he traced the alien slope of her with his eyes. –Across the room she lit a cigarette from one of her appallingly scented candles. She breathed out a long, quizzical plume of smoke before answering.

“Are you happy?”

“No,” he said, his hand moving to the narrow avenue between his eyes, rubbing away a vague ache and the smell of her cigarette. “I am unsettled,” he told her.

“Exactly,” she told him, and watched with her odd and compassionate eyes as the most powerful magician that ever was in the world lay back amid the garish pillows of her bed, weeping.

*

Sex helped the hollowness, he found, but it was an unhappier habit and a more depressing one at that: the next several centuries, in between projects, they define the art of the petty argument.

*

( _A long time later_ )

He says to her, in his lambent voice, “I have another wish.”

She breathes in through her nostrils and out again, hard. It’s almost a snort. “Took you long enough.” (She pauses, perhaps for effect.) “Idiot.”

“Take it back.”

“‘A fair price,’ and you agreed to it, Clow. You fucktard, this dimension we are so comfortably ensconced in is _linear_ , for the most part. And don’t ask if you can just _give it back_ ; do you think (and I mean this, I mean this, you darling sad-eyed fallible fool, though I will never tell you) that you could just—give it up?”

(He might be crying, but he knows how to hide it now. That point aside, she hasn’t looked him properly in the eyes for forty years.)

“Can nothing be done?”

Her next words have _bite_ : “You’re the most powerful magician in the world. Can’t you figure it out?”

“I am not omnipotent, Yuuko,” he tells her (over the years he has perfected his ability to scold, but there is nothing of that sort in his voice: he speaks in a very measured tone, because the alternative is far worse and she knows it). “I am not all right.”

(And she takes his face in her hands and promises him that one-day, he will die.)

*

She still doesn’t know why she did it—well, aside from the obvious, anyway; Yuuko’s perverse like that—because the two of them fought like cats, truly they did, and over the stupidest things: she never made the bed. She stole his godsdamned glasses twenty times a day. She insisted on naming their creations things like—like _natto_. 

He expected decorum in mathematics, as if they were a religion (in a way, they were). He treated his magic like it was a blood-borne disease. He never stopped smiling like a brainless scarecrow.

Yuuko never really loved him anyway.

(And this was not necessarily any fault of hers—as if there was a _right way_ jumbled up somewhere inside her!—because it wouldn’t have been enough to change anything, anyway.)

*

After a while, she pretends that those centuries didn’t matter. It’s easier, calling him names and insinuating that he was nearly always stoned, because who else but an inbred, androgynous loon with horrible taste in clothes would have insisted on so much frilly _pink_?

This is how Yuuko files away her own history. She ignores that there were true things exchanged between them, and ever so much hurt. It’s not often that you meet someone like that, who shares so much and has longevity and alcoholism mixed up inside their head. Yuuko has to make friends in pretty much the only way she’s sure of.

(Some days she wishes she were properly one thing or another instead of eternal delirium-dreams and so much helpless magic. Hitsuzen, hitsuzen, sometimes she just wants to wash her hair.)

*

“You have to be at least a little bit lost to find this place,” she will someday tell Watanuki. “If you were content with the life you’d gotten, fate wouldn’t have had a way to grab hold of you (once she does that, of course, you can never get free).”

**Author's Note:**

> This is from a massive backstory I originally was working on for fan_extension. I think it can pretty safely be termed an alternate universe now, as this was back when no one knew who Yuuko really was.
> 
> Written in 2006.


End file.
